Court throws out Armenian class-action lawsuit

A California law allowing heirs of victims of the Armenian genocide to sue in state courts for unpaid insurance benefits is invalid because it intrudes into sensitive foreign policy questions that are the exclusive domain of the federal government, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.

In an 11-0 decision that tiptoed around the use of the word "genocide," the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said the law, passed in 2000, "establishes a particular foreign policy for California" that exceeds any state's authority.

The court ordered dismissal of a class-action suit filed in 2003 by several hundred Armenian Americans against a German insurance group and two subsidiaries. The ruling effectively kills all suits filed under the law, since a lawyer for the plaintiffs, Lee Crawford Boyd, said there's little chance that the Supreme Court would agree to review an appeal.

It was the latest in a series of federal rulings that have barred California and other states from allowing victims of decades-old foreign atrocities, like the Nazi Holocaust and the alleged use of slave labor by the Japanese military, to seek redress in their courts.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/02/23/BAC31NBJGJ.DTL